Victor_Zsasz

Verizon actually claims it's their policy to remove throttling in emergencies such as these fires. In their statement, Verizon attributed this to employee error, in that the employee didn't properly apply company policy.

So, at least on paper, it's already policy at Verizon, and that's probably true for most major telecom firms. Stories like this are not good PR, and are easily avoided from a technical/managerial standpoint.

So in my semi-learned opinion, that's where policy will go/be reaffirmed going forward. I do hope you get an answer though, I'd love to see what they think.

So I'm not associated with the AMA, but I did read their Addendum Brief, which they linked in another thread, and is available here:

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4780226/VerizonFireDeclaration.pdf

In summary, they use a specialized device, (OSE Incident Support Unit) which provides near-real-time resource tracking via cloud computing. Specifically, it's used in resource check-in and routing for local government resources.

So in a sentence, they use the internet to help figure out where everything is, so they can then more efficiently deploy resources across such a large area.

They provided the full complaint to another person that asked this question. Here's the link: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4780226/VerizonFireDeclaration.pdf

To summarize that to answer you, it's extraordinarily difficult to coordinate 13,000 people, hundreds of vehicles, and dozens of aircraft over 726,000 acres under any circumstance. This is especially difficult to do when fighting large wildfires, since wildfires are apt to move very quickly, and are very dangerous, both to civilians and firefighters alike.

To fight such large fires, firefighters use a specialized device (Office of Emergency Service Incident Support Unit 5262), which tracks resources in near real-time, using cloud computing. It allows firefighters to move their resources as efficiently as possible, which means less loss of life and property. This device uses a lot of data per day to accomplish this.

At which point, on paper, the customer service rep should have removed it, in accordance with Verizon policy on disasters.

I actually was told a few months ago that I’d inadvertently replaced the real one (this one) with my own zip code at some point.

Don’t recall how the zip code for Zoom came up in conversation that day.